Over weeks of conflict, Yurii Fenenko, a coroner in the besieged Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, had become familiar with the way war mangles bodies, charting the damage caused by shrapnel, cluster bombs and bullets.
The 44-year-old dreaded the day he knew would surely come, when the body of someone he was close to was brought in. But he was not prepared for it to be someone he knew so well.
“It was the body of a dear friend and wife of one of my best mates,” Fenenko said in an interview at the weekend, bursting into tears at the memory. “The car she was driving hit a landmine as she was trying to flee a village where she lived near Chernihiv, which had been occupied by the Russians.”
Before the war, Fenenko examined an average of four bodies a day – mostly people who had died from disease, or occasionally in a car accident or gun violence.
Everything changed when Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, and Russian forces advancing from Belarus began bombarding the city. By 10 March Chernihiv was encircled by Russian forces, trapping its 150,000 inhabitants. Now Fenenko was examining up to 15 bodies a day.
“At first no one understood what was going on”, he said. “It was scary, you didn’t know what to expect. Then after a few days the first bodies started to turn up in our lab. And the numbers grew day by day.”
Space ran out in Chernihiv’s morgues, which are designed to hold 30 bodies, and corpses piled up in refrigerated trucks. Fenenko carried out his work in a room without electricity because of the bombing. A diesel generator provided dim light.
“Before the war, I had seen bodies completely torn apart by accidental explosions,” he said. “But never in such numbers.”
Fenenko’s postmortem reports are being forwarded to prosecutors investigating alleged war crimes perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine.
“Among the signs of torture, we found hands tied behind the back from bodies of people living in the Russian occupied villages, blindfolded, the limbs shot through,” he said. “Another time a missile hit a queue of people standing outside a grocery store. Thirty people were killed that day and they were all brought to my lab.”
Fenenko has extracted hundreds of projectiles and shrapnel from bodies, but also cluster bomb fragments, explosives which are designed to release dozens of smaller bombs, called submunitions, over a wide area. Cluster bombs are banned under international law by a 2008 treaty signed by more than 100 countries.
“You see these little cylinders? They come from a cluster bomb,” he said. “I found them in civilians’ bodies. Some of them explode when they hit the ground and some of them in the air. That’s why they hit lots of people.”
Fenenko said the most unusual thing he had found in bodies was probably fléchettes – small metal darts contained in tank or field gun shells. Each shell can contain up to 8,000 fléchettes. Once fired, shells burst when a timed fuse detonates and explodes above the ground. Once released from the shell, they disperse in a conical arch about 300m wide and 100m long. On impact with a victim’s body, the dart can lose rigidity, bending into a hook, while the arrow’s rear, made of four fins, often breaks away causing a second wound.
Early in April, Ukrainian forces liberated dozens of villages occupied by the Russians. At the end of the siege, more than 700 bodies were recovered from the Chernihiv region. Before abandoning the villages, the Russians placed thousands of mines that continue to cause injuries and deaths, while every day Ukrainian authorities find more bodies buried in the rubble.
As a coroner with over twenty years of experience, Fenenko said he had learned to put his emotions aside before starting an autopsy, but on the day police delivered the body of his old friend to his lab, it wasn’t possible.
“Fortunately, that day, there were two other experts working with me. So I let them perform the autopsy,” he said. “I just couldn’t do it.”
Artem Mazhulin contributed to this report
